Famous Views of Kyoto (Kyoto meisho no uchi)
Kyoto meisho no uchi
About This Series
Famous Views of Kyoto (Kyoto meisho no uchi) appears in Hiroshige's corpus under a title nearly identical to his principal Eikyudo set of around 1834, and the entry here may represent an alternative impression run, a related Kyoto cycle by the same hand, or a variant titling of the standard ten designs as they circulated through subsequent editions. The imperial capital, distinguished by classical poetic association and by its position as the western terminus of the Tokaido, was a perennial subject of meisho-e from the eighteenth century forward, and Hiroshige returned to it across his career in formats that ranged from the oban yoko-e landscape to the chuban, fan print, and surimono. As with the better-attested ten-print set, the Kyoto views in this group draw on guidebook precedent for their topographical notation and translate that material into Hiroshige's atmospheric idiom of low horizon, modulated sky, and quietly populated foreground. Sites favored across the various Kyoto series include the Shijo riverbed in summer, the cherries of Arashiyama, the maples at Tofuku-ji, the moon over Gion, and similar destinations whose classical and seasonal associations were inseparable from their identity. As a fukei-e designer who had built his early reputation on the Tokaido, Hiroshige treated Kyoto as the natural counterweight to Edo, the two great cities of his career bracketing the meisho-e project at either end of the highway. Modern scholarship reads the Kyoto material as evidence of his sustained engagement with classical landscape vocabulary, and individual sheets across the various series are valued for the calibration of bokashi work and the documentary record they provide of late-Edo Kyoto. The relatively small representation of this particular cycle in the database reflects the wider scholarly difficulty of distinguishing related Kyoto sets whose titles overlap and whose impressions have been attributed across multiple cataloguing systems.
Prints in This Series (1)
Complete series — all 1 prints catalogued.
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Views of Kyoto (Kyoto meisho no uchi) appears in Hiroshige's corpus under a title nearly identical to his principal Eikyudo set of around 1834, and the entry here may represent an alternative impression run, a related Kyoto cycle by the same hand, or a variant titling of the standard ten designs as they circulated through subsequent editions. The imperial capital, distinguished by classical poetic association and by its position as the western terminus of the Tokaido, was a perennial subject of meisho-e from the eighteenth century forward, and Hiroshige returned to it across his career in formats that ranged from the oban yoko-e landscape to the chuban, fan print, and surimono. As with the better-attested ten-print set, the Kyoto views in this group draw on guidebook precedent for their topographical notation and translate that material into Hiroshige's atmospheric idiom of low horizon, modulated sky, and quietly populated foreground. Sites favored across the various Kyoto series include the Shijo riverbed in summer, the cherries of Arashiyama, the maples at Tofuku-ji, the moon over Gion, and similar destinations whose classical and seasonal associations were inseparable from their identity. As a fukei-e designer who had built his early reputation on the Tokaido, Hiroshige treated Kyoto as the natural counterweight to Edo, the two great cities of his career bracketing the meisho-e project at either end of the highway. Modern scholarship reads the Kyoto material as evidence of his sustained engagement with classical landscape vocabulary, and individual sheets across the various series are valued for the calibration of bokashi work and the documentary record they provide of late-Edo Kyoto. The relatively small representation of this particular cycle in the database reflects the wider scholarly difficulty of distinguishing related Kyoto sets whose titles overlap and whose impressions have been attributed across multiple cataloguing systems.
The Famous Views of Kyoto (Kyoto meisho no uchi) series contains 1 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The Famous Views of Kyoto (Kyoto meisho no uchi) series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Famous Views of Kyoto (Kyoto meisho no uchi) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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